The Silence Got Very Good And Very Empty

She has done it every day for nine years, twenty minutes, mostly at six.

She got into it in a hard year and it saved her, which is not an overstatement. She had a mind that would not stop and somebody showed her how to sit, and within about four months she had something she had never had, which was a floor.

And she has got very good at it.

That is a strange thing to say about silence and it is accurate. She settles in about ninety seconds now, where it used to take twelve minutes. She knows what to do when her mind goes. She can do it in a train station.

She could teach it, and two people have asked her to, and she has said no both times without being able to explain why.

Here is why, and she has never put it into a sentence before.

Somewhere in about the sixth year, without any day she could name, the practice became something she does and stopped being somewhere she goes.

The twenty minutes are excellent. Her mind is quiet. Something in her nervous system has been permanently altered for the better and she would not give it up for anything.

And she is no longer sure there is anybody there.

Not doubt about God. She wants to be precise, because she is a precise person. She has not stopped believing anything. It is that in the twenty minutes themselves, which is where she used to meet somebody, there is now a very well managed quiet, and it is hers, and she has begun to suspect it has been hers alone for about three years.

The stillness works. It does everything it says on the label.

And nobody is in it.

And you have a practice you are now excellent at. It does what it promised and it has genuinely improved your life, and somewhere along the way the Person it was for went out of the room and you cannot say when.

My soul thirsts for the living God

There is a line in Psalm forty-two where a man describes what he actually wants, and he uses two words in a row that stop the sentence being about religion.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?Psalm 42:2

The living God.

He does not say for God's peace, which he badly needed. He does not say for stillness, or for the settling of his own mind, which the whole psalm is about.

He says God, and then he adds living, as though the first word on its own might be heard as an idea and he wants to make sure it is not.

And the second half is a question about appearing before somebody, which is a word about presentation to a person.

You have been thirsty for a Person and the word living is in the verse on purpose. It is written that my soul thirsts for God, for the living God (Psalm 42:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalm about a restless man and hands it to a woman whose restlessness was cured nine years ago.

Now the practice, and this has to be said carefully because it saved you.

Nobody on this page is going to tell you that twenty minutes of silence was the wrong thing to build, or that the skill you have acquired is a spiritual problem, or that you should stop.

It gave you a floor in a hard year. Your nervous system was rebuilt. You can settle in ninety seconds and you can do it in a train station, and that is a real and good thing that a great many people would give anything for.

You are holding a genuine good and it is not being taken off you or called into question. Scripture says whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, think about these things (Philippians 4:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in nine years of six o'clocks, including the three you suspect were empty.

And the thing about the sixth year.

The practice became something you do and stopped being somewhere you go. That is your own sentence and it is exact.

That happens to every practice that works. Competence is what a repeated action produces, and once competence arrives the action can run without the person, and there is nothing sinister in it and no fault anywhere. It is simply what skill does.

You are experiencing what mastery does to any practice, and it is not evidence that anybody left. It is written that He is not far from each one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:27-28), and it is the Holy Spirit who has not gone anywhere in three years, which is the difference between an absence and an unnoticed presence.

And the two people who asked you to teach it.

You said no twice and could not explain why, and now you can. You did not want to hand somebody a technique and call it a meeting, because you are honest and you had begun to suspect what you were holding.

That refusal is the most spiritually alert thing in this whole account.

You declined twice to pass on a method as though it were a Person, and that instinct was right. Scripture says the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Corinthians 3:6), and it is His Spirit who gives that life, and He is the one you would not have been able to include in a syllabus, and you knew it.